Uncatchable

Continued (page 3 of 5)

Reservations for the three men, two women, and three children were made over the phone. They booked coach class, near the rear of the plane, on Delta flight 841, a Detroit-to-Miami nonstop scheduled to leave on July 31, 1972, at about 9 a.m.

···

The men boarded the plane in outfits that they anticipated would not arouse suspicion. Brown dressed as a disheveled student. McNair was a businessman. Wright was a priest. He wore black vestments and a clerical collar and held a Bible in his hand. He'd booked his ticket under the name Reverend Larry Darnell Burgess.

They were quiet for the first two hours of the flight. Food was served and collected. In addition to Wright's eight-person party, there were eighty-six passengers and seven crew members. After the meal, says McNair in a soon-to-be-released documentary film called Melvin & Jean: An American Story, a flight attendant passed through the plane. Wright tapped her on the shoulder. They were flying over Savannah, Georgia, about an hour from landing.

Wright's marriage to a portuguese national in 1990.

"Excuse me," Wright said. "Can I ask you something?"

The flight attendant ducked down to speak to him, and Wright displayed his gun. It had been hidden in the hollowed-out Bible. At the time, Delta did not use metal detectors in Detroit. The others' weapons, it's theorized—Wright won't confirm this—were concealed in a baby carrier and inside a portable radio.

When the flight attendant saw Wright's gun, she jumped back. "Keep cool," Wright told her. "Just take us to the cockpit." And he followed close behind her, up the aisle.

The hijacking is a touchy subject for Wright. He's never been brought to trial for the crime, and if the Portuguese judges rule against him, Wright knows that the United States will likely prosecute him for it. Domestic terrorism can be punished with the death penalty. Wright doesn't deny being on that airplane, dressed as a priest. But any details he provides, he explains to me, could only hurt him.

The pilot of the plane, a DC-8, was William Harold May. He was 41 years old at the time. He's now 81, but his memory of the event seems impeccable, his voice retaining the jargony, confident-verging-on-cocky rhythm of a captain on the PA. He spoke to me for hours.

May told me he wasn't in the cockpit when the hijacking started. He was using the bathroom. "When I came out," he says, "this fellow turned around"—it was probably McNair—"and he had what looked like a .45 and kind of stuck it in my belly and said, 'They want you up front.' So I go in the cockpit, and everybody up there is white as a sheet."

Wright was already in the cockpit, according to May, with a flight attendant as his hostage. "He had his arm around her neck and a revolver pointed at her head, cocked," says May. "I thought she was going to faint."

"Uncock the gun and we'll talk," May said to Wright.

"The gun's all right," he replied.

"No," said May, "I'm not going to talk to you until you uncock that gun. Those things go off."

Wright uncocked the gun. "My knees were kind of weak," recalls May. "I said, 'Let me get in my seat.' " Wright moved aside, and May sat at the controls.

"What do you want?" May asked.

"We want a million dollars," answered Wright. "And we want to go to Algeria."

···

From the pilot's seat, May managed to surreptitiously enter a set of numbers into the dashboard transponder. Miami air-traffic control responded through his headphones.

"Are you squawking 7500?" That's the code for a hijacking in action.

"Affirmative," replied May, and Miami International began preparations to receive the flight.

After they landed, May taxied the plane to an abandoned runway. He tried to talk Wright out of his plan. "You know," May told him, "this airplane won't fly to Algeria. It doesn't have the range. We'll probably go down in the ocean, and everybody's going to drown. Are you ready for that?"

This wasn't entirely a lie. Despite all the preparation Wright and his team had done, they'd failed to realize that there were two types of DC-8's. The international version had more fuel tanks than the domestic model—ten instead of eight —and specialized water-emergency equipment. Even more daunting, May himself had never piloted an overseas flight; he'd never even left the United States on vacation.

But Wright was committed. Asked if they were prepared to die, Wright said, "Yes, we're Black Panthers."

The Delta ramp supervisor at the time, in charge of loading and unloading baggage, was Buster Cooper. He was 27 years old, in the operations center, listening to the radio chatter. The FBI was trying to persuade Wright to release the passengers. Then, says Cooper, he heard a statement over the radio that will forever be seared into his memory. It was Wright speaking from the cockpit.

"If you don't bring us the money," Wright said, "we're going to throw some motherfucking heads out the motherfucking door."

"Everybody in operations," says Cooper, "went, 'Whoa, this is getting serious.' " The First National Bank of Miami was contacted, and soon the money was on its way.

The bills, fifties and hundreds, were placed in "a cheap-ass suitcase" plucked from customer service, recalls Cooper. The black case, with a Delta Air Lines luggage tag, bulged at the sides.

There was discussion in the cockpit about how, exactly, the handoff would occur. Wright was worried about an ambush. "I want that man to come out here nude," he told May.

"Be reasonable," said May. News of the hijacking had spread, and dozens of people were rubbernecking just beyond the airport's chain-link fence.

The plane's copilot, Darl Henderson, had an idea: "What about a skintight bathing suit?"

Wright agreed. So a Delta employee ran over to the men's store in the airport and purchased two swimsuits, with dark vertical stripes and a thick white waistband.

Cooper changed into the suit. An FBI agent named Bob Mills did the same. Then Cooper drove the mobile stairway out to the plane. He stopped twenty feet away. They'd promised to arrive unarmed, but in fact Mills kept a six-shot revolver on the seat.

"If I had my way," says Mills in Melvin & Jean, "I would've shot them. Because I didn't think they deserved to live."

He didn't get his way. Wright shouted instructions through the partially opened side window of the cockpit—the only way for him to communicate with Cooper and Mills. He made each of them walk away from the truck, barefoot and shirtless, then turn around to verify they were unarmed.

Mills dragged the suitcase to the base of the plane. One of the flight attendants opened a door and tossed out a length of red vinyl "escape tape." Mills tied it to the suitcase. The attendants hauled it up and handed the million dollars over to the hijackers.

···

The passengers were released, driven away in two buses. After more than three hours in Miami, the plane, with the hijack team and flight crew and all the passengers' luggage, took off. May had convinced Wright about the plane's travel capabilities, and the hijackers agreed to fly to Boston, where they could take on an international navigator and also shorten the trip to Algeria by a thousand miles.

They landed at Logan Airport, rolled to the end of the runway, and parked. Eight sharpshooters were posted nearby, some dressed as airline workers.

Two white Mobil fuel trucks arrived, the refuelers wearing swimsuits, and 13,800 gallons were pumped into the plane. The navigator, also in a bathing suit, arrived carrying a satchel filled with maps and clothing. He propped an aluminum ladder against the plane and climbed aboard. Then one of the hijackers kicked the ladder away and sealed the door.

May had specifically requested that he didn't want any funny business here; he needed a real navigator, someone who could guide him on his first trip across the Atlantic. "I didn't want some FBI guy to come on with guns blazing," he says.

But May took one look in the navigator's bag—the maps were uselessly large-scale, and the uniform was wrong—and he realized the FBI wasn't playing this straight. After the plane took off, the man instructed May to activate the alternating-current isolation switch. Once he did, warning lights would flash all over the control panel.

"What's the motive, man?" May asked.

"Tell them we're having an emergency and have to go back to Boston," he said. "Tell them we'll have another airplane waiting." May understood that when the hijackers were transferring planes, the snipers would have a shot at them.

The plan was flawed. "The last time I actuated the AC isolation switch," May said, "I lost all the flight instruments." This could cause a genuine emergency, and May wasn't willing to risk it. "Let's just get on with it," he said.

So May continued east, over the Atlantic. In the first-class section there were seats that faced each other with a table between. The suitcase, May remembers, was on this table, opened up. "They were like children around that money," says May. "One of them took a pack—it had this money band that said $20,000—and handed it to me and said, 'Here's a tip for the crew.' " May turned down the offer.

Because the plane was equipped for domestic travel, it had only a VHF radio. Its range was less than 200 miles, so the plane was soon completely out of contact. There was still no water-emergency gear. Stormy weather raged over the Atlantic. May, for his inaugural international flight, hadn't slept in more than twenty hours and had eaten only a Charleston Chew. A gun was frequently pressed against his head by a man dressed as a priest. "It was not the best setup," says May.

Still, with the help of Spanish air-traffic controllers May contacted as the plane skimmed Europe, they landed at Dar el Beida airport in Algiers. An official drove out with a set of stairs. The hijackers opened the door.

"We want to see Eldridge Cleaver," said Wright.

···

The Black Panthers lived in a white stucco villa in the wealthy outskirts of Algiers, a mansion donated by the Algerian government. Cleaver adorned the place with two brass plaques engraved with leaping panthers. But for the hijackers, any visions they had of Algeria as utopia swiftly crumbled.

First, there was the matter of the money. The hijackers were allowed to stay with the Panthers, but the government seized the suitcase before it left the plane. Cleaver sent a letter to Algeria's president, Houari Boumedienne. "Without the money to finance and organize the struggle," he wrote, "there will be no freedom." Yet the case was returned to the United States. The hijackers did not keep a single dollar.

Then there was Cleaver himself. "The only thing that interested him was the money," says Brown in a documentary film about him called Nobody Knows My Name. "They weren't dealing with the struggle. They were women-hunting in Algeria." Neighbors of the mansion complained about all-night parties. While his wife was away, Cleaver apparently initiated an affair with a local teenager. "We risked our lives for believing in the cause," says Brown. "When we got there, the cause wasn't there. They fucked it up."